Appreciative Inquiry
Collaborating for Change
edited by Peggy Holman and Tom Devane
Appreciative
Inquiry
David L. Cooperrider and
Diana Whitney
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Peggy Holman and Tom Devane
Voices That Count: Realizing the Potential of Change 1
Appreciative Inquiry 4
David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney
How did GTE Do It? 4
What Is Appreciative Inquiry? 5
Getting Started 6
Roles, Responsibilities, and Relationships 11
Appreciative Inquiry and Power in Organizations 12
Conditions for Success 13
Theoretical Basis 14
Sustaining The Results 16
Conclusion 16
Notes 17
Resources 18
Where to Go for Further Information 18
Questions For Thinking Aloud 20
The Authors 21
Copyright © 1999 by David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney
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Appreciative Inquiry
Introduction
/Peggy Holman and Tom Devane
Voices That Count:Realizing the Potential of Change
As seen through the lens of history, change is inevitable. Just look at any history book. Everything from fashions to attitudes has changed dramatically though the years. Change reflects underlying shifts in values and expectations of the times. Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press in the fifteenth century, for example, bolstered the developing humanism of the Renaissance. The new technology complemented the emerging emphasis on individual expression that brought new developments in music, art, and literature. Economic and political shifts paralleled the changing tastes in the arts, creating a prosperous and innovative age—a start contrast to the preceding Middle Ages.
On the surface, technology enabled greater freedom and prosperity. Yet this century has overwhelmed us with new technologies: automobiles, airplanes, radios, televisions, telephones, computers, the Internet. What distinguishes change today is the turbulence created by the breathtaking pace required to assimilate its effects.
In terms of social change, one trend is clear: People are demanding a greater voice in running their own lives. Demonstrated by the American Revolution and affirmed more recently in the fall of the Berlin Wall, the riots in Tiananmen Square, the social unrest in Indonesia, and the redistribution of power in South Africa, this dramatic shift in values and expectations creates enormous potential for positive change today.
One reason is that change introduces uncertainty. While change holds the possibility of good things happening, 80 percent of us see only its negative aspects.[1] And even when people acknowledge their current situation is far from perfect, given the choice between the devil they know and the devil they don’t, most opt for the former. The remedy we are learning is to involve people in creating a picture of a better future. Most of us are drawn toward the excitement and possibility of change and move past our fear of the unknown.
Another reason we are wary of change is that it can create winners and losers. Clearly the British were not happy campers at the end of the American Revolution. In corporations, similar battle lines are often drawn between those with something to lose and those with something to gain. The real challenge is to view the change systemically and ask what’s best for both parties in the post-change environment.
Finally, many people have real data that change is bad for them. These change survivors know that “flavor of the month” change initiatives generally fall disappointingly short. In our organizations and communities, many people have experienced the results of botched attempts at transformational change. Like the cat that jumps on a hot stove only once, it’s simply human nature to avoid situations that cause pain. And let’s face it, enough change efforts have failed, to create plenty of cynicism over the past ten years. For these people, something had better “smell” completely different if they’re going to allow themselves to care.
Ironically, as demands for greater[2] involvement in our organizations increased, leaders of many well-publicized, large-scale change efforts moved the other way and totally ignored people. They chose instead to focus on more visible and seemingly easier-to-manage components such as information technology, strategic architectures, and business processes. Indeed, “Downsize” was the ubiquitous battle cry of the nineties. According to a 1996 New York Times poll, “nearly three-quarters of all households have had a close encounter with layoffs since 1980. In one-third of all households, a family member has lost a job, and nearly 40 percent more know a relative, friend, or neighbor who was laid off.” The individual impact has been apparent in the increased stress, longer working hours, and reduced sense of job security chronicled in virtually every recent book and article on change.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “Never before in the field of human endeavors was so much screwed up by so few for so many.” By ignoring the need to involve people in something that affects them, many of today’s popular change methods have left a bad taste in the mouths of “change targets” (as one popular methodology calls those affected) for any type of change. They have also often left behind less effective organizations with fewer people and lower morale. Consequently, even well-intentioned, well-designed change efforts have a hard time getting off the ground.
If and organization or community leaders do recognize that emerging values and rapidly shifting environmental demands call for directly engaging people in change, they often face another challenge. When the fear of uncertainty, the potential for winners and losers, and the history of failures define change, how can they systematically involve people and have some confidence that it will work? That is where this booklet comes in.
A Way Through
This booklet offers an approach that works because it acknowledges the prevailing attitude towards change. It offers a fresh view based on the possibility of a more desirable future, experience with the whole system, and activities that signal “something different is happening this time.” That difference systematically taps the potential of human beings to make themselves, their organizations, and their communities more adaptive and more effective. This approach is based on solid, proven principles for unleashing people’s creativity, knowledge, and spirit towards a common purpose.
How can this be? It does so by filling two huge voids that large-scale change efforts miss. This first improvement is intelligently involving people in changing their workplaces and communities. We have learned that creating a collective sense of purpose, sharing information traditionally known only to a few, valuing what people have to contribute, and inviting them to participate in meaningful ways positively affects outcomes. In other words, informed, engaged people can produce dramatic results.
The second improvement is a systemic approach to change. By asking “Who’s affected? Who has a stake in this?” we begin to recognize that no change happens in isolation. Making the interdependencies explicit enables shifts based on a common view of the whole. We can each play our part while understanding our contribution to the system. We begin to understand that in a change effort the “:one-party-wins-and-one-party-loses” perception need not necessarily be the case. When viewed from a systemic perspective, the lines between “winners” and “losers” become meaningless as everyone participates in co-creating the future for the betterment of all. The advantages are enormous: coordinated actions and closer relationships lead to simpler, more effective solutions.
The growing numbers of success stories are beginning to attract attention. Hundreds of examples around the world of dramatic and sustained increases in organization and community performance now exist.[3] With such great potential, why isn’t everyone operating this way? The catch with high-involvement systemic change is that more people have their say. Until traditional managers are ready to say yes to that, no matter how stunning the achievements of others, these approaches will remain out of reach for most and a competitive advantage for a few.
Our Purpose
This booklet describes an approach that has helped others achieve dramatic, sustainable results in their organization or communities. Our purpose is to provide basic information that you can use to decide whether this approach is right for you. We give you an overview including an illustrative story, answers to frequently asked questions and tips for getting started. We’ve also given you discussion questions for “thinking aloud” with others and a variety of references to learn more.
There is ample evidence that when high involvement and a system-wide approach are used, the potential for unimagined results is within reach. As Goethe so eloquently reminds us, “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
What are you waiting for?
Appreciative Inquiry
/David L. Cooperriderand Diana Whitney
Be the change you want to see in the world — Gandhi
“Appreciative Inquiry begins an adventure. Even in the first steps, one senses an exciting direction in our language and theories of change—an invitation, as some have declared, to ‘a positive revolution.’ ” The words just quoted are strong and, unfortunately, not ours. The more we replay the high-wire moments of our work at GTE, the more we ask the same question the people of GTE asked their senior executives: “are you really ready for the momentum being generated? This is igniting a grass roots movement … it is creating an organization in full voice, a center stage for positive revolutionaries!”
Tom White, president of what was then called GTE Teleops (making up 80 percent of GTE’s 67,000 employees) replied with no hesitation: “Yes, and what I see in this meeting are zealots, people with a mission and passion for creating the new GTE. Count me in, I’m your number one recruit, number one zealot.” People cheered.
Fourteen months later—based on significant and measurable changes in stock price, morale survey measures, quality / customer relations, union-management relations, and so on—GTE’s whole-system change initiative won the 1997 ASTD (American Association for Training and Development) award for best organization-change program in the country. Appreciative Inquiry was cited as the “backbone.”
How did GTE Do It?
Tom White interprets AI in executive language:
Appreciative Inquiry gets much better results than seeking out and solving problems. That’s an interesting concept for me—and I imagine for most of you—because telephone companies are amongst the world’s best problem solvers. We concentrate enormous resources on correcting problems ... when used continually over a long time, this approach leads to a negative culture. If you combine a negative culture with the challenges we face today, we could easily convince ourselves that we have too many problems to overcome—to slip into a paralyzing sense of hopelessness. … Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating mindless happy talk. Appreciative Inquiry is a complex science designed to make things better. We can’t ignore problems—we just need to approach them from the other side.[4]
What Tom White called “the other side” we describe as the positive change core. AI is a tool for connecting to the transformational power of this core by opening every strength, innovation, achievement, imaginative story, hope, positive tradition, passion, and dream to systematic inquiry. It involves asking appreciative questions, such as the following:
1. Describe a high-point experience in your organization, a time when you have been most active and engaged.
2. Without being modest, tell me what it is that you most value about yourself, your work, your organization.
3. What are the core factors that give life to your organization, without which the organization would not be the same?
4. What three wishes do you have to enhance the health and vitality of your organization?
AI then uses the stories generated to create new, more compelling images of the organization and its future.
To achieve the stunning shift in the GTE culture, we asked, “How can we engage the positive potential of all employees toward transforming the company? We wanted whatever we did to recognize and invite frontline employee self-sovereignty. We set a goal of creating a narrative-rich culture with a ratio of five positive stories to every negative one. We approached this in a number of ways:
· In one year we taught Appreciative Inquiry to 800 frontline employees.
· We created opportunities for sharing “good news” stories. One executive volunteered to be the story center. The stories came into his office, and he sent them out to other groups to share and replicate. Many were published in the employee newsletter.
· Storytelling was embedded into various processes. For example, the President’s Leadership Awards program focused on storytelling about the winning employees, their teams, and customer service.
· We added open-ended questions to the company employee survey and tracked the ration of positive to negative comments.
· We created an Appreciative Inquiry storybook as teaching tool for all employees.
· We introduced large group (100-1,000 people) Appreciative inquiry into strategic change arenas—for example, to design and affirm a new partnership model between the unions and GTE management at the most senior levels.
With these and many other activities, we focused GTE employees on their power to positively impact self-esteem, identity, and success—through the quality of their conversations and the stories they shared.
In the ten years since the AI theory and vision were published,[5] hundreds of people have co-created AI practices, bringing AI’s spirit and methodology into organizations all over the world. While the outcome and illustrations we have selected are often dramatic, we emphasize that AI is in its infancy.
What Is Appreciative Inquiry?
AI has been described in a myriad of ways: a radically affirmative approach to change that completely lets go of problem-based management,[6] the most important advance in action research in the past decade,[7] and organization developer’s philosopher’s stone.[8] Summing up AI is difficult—a philosophy of knowing, a methodology for managing change, an approach to leadership and human development. Here is a practice-oriented definition.